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Orange Cake
1/2 cupful butter, 2 cupfuls sugar, 5 eggs, 1 pint flour, 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls baking-powder, 1 teaspoonful extract orange, 1 cupful milk. Rub the butter and sugar to a cream; add the eggs, two at a time, beating five minutes after each addition; add the flour sifted with the powder, the milk, and extract; mix into a smooth, fine batter, put in a paper-lined cake-tin, and bake in a moderate oven thirty minutes. When cool, cover the top with the following preparation: Whip the whites of 3 eggs to a dry froth; then carefully mix in 4 cupfuls sugar, the juice, grated rind, and soft pulp, free of white pith and seeds, of 2 sour oranges.
A plain butter cake with an uncooked orange icing. The cake itself is straightforward; the topping is the problem, and it is why this one should not be made as printed.
- The icing is raw egg whiteThe whites are whipped, sweetened and spread on a cooled cake with no cooking or heating at any stage, then left to stand. Uncooked egg white carries a Salmonella risk that nothing in this method reduces. If you want a citrus topping for the cake, use a current recipe that either cooks the whites or specifies pasteurised ones.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume here: a pint is 2 cupfuls, roughly 8-9 oz depending on how it is scooped. Sift it with the baking powder as directed rather than weighing to a modern cake formula, since the proportions of this batter depend on the light volume measure.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F; the recipe gives no temperature. It also gives no tin size, so thirty minutes will suit a single 9-inch round or 8-inch square; a deeper tin will want longer and a skewer test.
- Paper-lined cake-tinParchment cut to the base, with the sides buttered, answers the original direction to line the tin with paper. The batter is heavy with sugar and will stick without it.
- Beating five minutes after each additionPresumably reckoned for hand beating. With a stand mixer on medium, one to two minutes per pair of eggs is enough; over-beating past the point where the batter looks smooth and glossy only risks it splitting.
- Sour orangesThese are Seville or bitter oranges, sold in late winter and mostly used for marmalade. Ordinary sweet oranges give a much flatter result; a mixture of sweet orange with some lemon juice is the usual stand-in.
- The sugar in the toppingFour cupfuls of sugar to three whites plus the juice and pulp of two oranges gives a very stiff, almost fondant-like paste rather than a soft frosting. Read it as a spreadable paste, not a meringue, if you are judging the proportions against modern icings.
- YieldOne cake of about 8 to 10 servings. The two cupfuls of sugar in the batter make it sweet by current standards even before any topping.
History: Orange extract and baking powder together point to the later nineteenth or early twentieth century, when commercial flavouring extracts and chemical leaveners were widely available alongside the older practice of relying on beaten eggs for lift. The cake is a standard creamed butter cake given its character largely by the topping, and the call for sour oranges reflects the place bitter Seville oranges held as a winter citrus in English-speaking kitchens, valued for marmalade and for flavouring because their sharpness cut through heavy sugar. Uncooked icings built from raw whites and a great deal of sugar appear commonly in books of this kind, under various names, and persisted in print well into the twentieth century, before egg-borne illness was understood as a kitchen concern.